Author
Topic: Old Brummie sayings got any ? (Read 190318 times)

If you ask anyone who was born in a back to back environment in Birmingham. They will tell you about Percy Shurmer and his campaign to have the miskins removed from the back courts and terraces of Birmingham. He was called the miskin king because he used to go round demolishing these miskins with his bare hands.

They were lean to structures places adjacent to the communal toilets ans washhouses. Until Percy's successful campaign all the rubbish was just dumped in these miskins until the landlords people came round to clear it.

After these miskins were replaced with bins, because the bins were placed in the area of the miskins they also were known to the people of these areas as miskins,

phil miskins thats a new one on me and I'm from a back to back house in Angelina street with a brew house and bog at the top of the yard and we had a place that the dust bin was kept all 8 of them but i never new it was called a miskin to us it was a binole

You surprise me, an old lad from Balsall Heath never heard of miskins, your Grannie would turn in her grave. Heres an excerpt from one of Carl Chinns books. You will be telling me next you've never heard of him. Well he is only a bit of a kid.

phil sorry to say but i do not know c/chinn but i knew his family they was book makers and when i was a kid i used to take bets to this bookies runner who stood on the corner that would be about 1950 c/chinn is a lot young than me but i do know of him and his books about brum

As you say Carl Chinn comes from a family of bookmaker, his family and my wife's family are related through marriage, not that he would know her if he walked past her in the street. He is a closer relative to my best mate. I went to Carl Chinns wedding with my mate in the early seventies. Well it was either him or his brother. I'm not sure which.

I remember the family when they had bookie shops, and as you say before it was legal and you used to hand your bets to a runner.

Carl's quite a celebrity now in Birmingham, not that I am a fan. He gets far too many thing wrong in his books for my liking. Thats the trouble when you achieve a bit of fame you start leaving menial things like research to assistants, and they couldn't care less.

I always give my postman and dustmen a tip..."look bothways, before you cross the road", I France every year the post man comes round with a calender for the new year, which he sells to you for about a fiver, but he buys them in for about 2 quid, OK its Christmas, but you also offered a drink, Vin, "Hic", well I used to live at the end of a long lane, by the time he got to us, he was [censored] as a rat, ,

I understand that he is a very busy man and he may make mistakes in the rush of it all, but then we all make mistakes. He has done me proud, a back street kid from Sparkbrook, who else would have bothered? Carl =

Logged

tramp

My granddad used to say the following, ''I'll go to [censored] an' eat coke'', ''Up the wooden hill, down sheet lane, tuck me into bed, and off to sleep again'', and ''I'll go to the top of our stairs" - not the bottom/foot.

Logged

tramp

And of course there's ''she's gorra a lorra bleedin' mouf she 'as'' - with reference to a talkative female.

I received 4 of C Chinn's mags, and there were errors in 3, if they were less of a business and more of an informative medium, as someone wrotr, they may well be better redearched - leastways, I won't get a 5th, even though the 4 were free.